Description:Among the most important thinkers of the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci is rarely read today in a systematic fashion. The reasons lie partly in the nature of his corpus, which consists largely in “prison notebooks” written not for publication and in a fashion aimed at evading censorship. Equally daunting is the densely contextualized character of Gramsci’s writings, which comment on and allude to historical and political developments that are unfamiliar to many readers in our own time. Still other obstacles lie in the dominance today of an analytical style that is far removed from Gramsci’s and in the relative delegitimation of Marxist thought in the late 20th century. For all these reasons, Gramsci is rarely read in a serious way, even as his name is often dropped in discussions of civil society, cultural hegemony, historicism, fordism, etc. The effect is to substitute a selective and distorted picture–a sort of “Gramsci light” for his actual thought. This course aims to begin to remedy this situation by undertaking a careful, systematic reading of his most important work.